After spending $276 million dollars on a Frank Gehry-designed expansion in 2009, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) laid off 29 workers. This year the jobs of 39 additional workers are threatened. Meanwhile increasing numbers of AGO employees are hired on a part-time or casual basis. According to the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), the union that represents AGO employees, in 2005 the gallery had 136 full-time and 159 part-time staff. Today there are 177 full-time staff and the number of part-time staff has grown to 266. Toronto’s biggest booster of the virtues of creative employment (which often ends up being casual or part-time), Richard Florida, is appointed by the Province of Ontario to serve on the Board of the AGO.

Check out the great new flyer from Hamiltonians Against Neighborhood Displacement (HAND) about how creative city policies are causing displacement in Hamilton, Ontario. If you are interested in contacting them please let us know.

Carrotworkers’ Collective is a London-based group working to understand and challenge the insidious culture of unpaid work – including ‘voluntary’ internships – that has swept over the creative and cultural sectors. Their resistance is long overdue.

Activists in Hamburg, Germany are successfully resisting the redevelopment of their city. Read their manifesto against creative class policies at Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg’s blog. The manifesto is translated into English here.

According to the event’s website – politicians, private consultants, architects, community development advocates, culture workers, and public space activists are meeting to plan the future of urban policy.

According to the conference’s website, these are exciting, new boundary blurring partnerships because…

“The new imperative to collaborate is rooted in the need to solve persistent multi-dimensional problems and a growing appreciation of how collaboration fuels innovation. It is blurring boundaries between audience and creator, hgdksl anoi ksdjhf….”

Aaack! We’re lost!

Let’s step back and ask:

Whose success are these stakeholders discussing?

Is everyone invited to the table to collaborate?

As people ‘break down’ barriers to create ‘new platforms’ for dialogue about cities in these workshops – what kind of cities are they envisioning?

Isn’t work becoming increasingly precarious or unavailable? Isn’t housing increasingly unaffordable for most people? Aren’t social services for the poor increasingly underfunded and overburdened? Is this the “collaboration for collective interest” that conference planners envision?

What is the city for? Who gets to live here? Who decides?

Creative Class Struggle urges you to question the Creative Cities phenomenon routinely celebrated at Creative Places and Spaces and in cities across the world.